David Farnor | On 07, Jul 2020

BFI Player will release Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men this July.

The film marks the feature directorial debut of the Oscar-nominated Icelandic composer, who tragically passed away in 2018.

Two billion years ahead of us, a future race of humans finds itself on the verge of extinction. Almost all that is left in the world are lone and surreal monuments, beaming their message into the wilderness…

A long-term passion project of Jóhannsson, developed over many years and completed by his collaborators after his death, it combines music, image and narration from Tilda Swinton to explore memory and failed utopia. Based on Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future, the 1930 sci-fi novel by British author Olaf Stapledon, is sets Jóhannsson’s orchestral score to 16mm black and white footage shot by cinematographer and co-producer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (Victoria, Rams) of abstract brutalist monuments known as Spomeniks, erected during the communist era in the former Yugoslavia.

After Johansson’s death, his team of collaborators returned to complete the advanced edit, with sound artist and composer Yair Elazar Glotman finishing the music.

The result is “a dazzling and unique piece of art”, we wrote in Add to Watchlist